Mike and I are chasing beta patches and trying to stay in synch. I ran into something odd today and wanted to confirm something.

Is it true that the Allied player can watch the WPAE01 combat replay file multiple times? IOW, is the file a "movie", or does it actually execute every time it's run, giving different results due to randoms being generated?

I ask this because I have been running it multiple times to review his moves and to write the AAR, and have never noticed differences between viewings. But today, I had an 01 file generated under beta 19, and I reran it under beta 19E in order to re-generate the Intel text file so I could hand-order Tracker to load it. I got different results. A ship sank which didn't before, and I had air attacks happen which also didn't happen before.

Was this just because of the beta versions differing? Or am I never supposed to watch the 01 file more than once?

Running the file multiple times under the same game version should provide identical results. I think the issue here is the replay on different game versions.

I think so too, but I wanted to be sure. The manual is a bit terse on PBEM file handling.

He sent the next 015 file (our save location) and when I open it the ship is NOT sunk. I can't check the air strike obviously. I think the bottom line is I will have an incorrect combatevents.txt in my Archive folder and I'll have unreliable Intel results for one day in Tracker. Not fatal in either case.

The Manual states “To help players guard against turns being replayed for better results, we have designed our replay feature to save all game turn results. This means that no matter how many times the same turn is played, the results will always be the same” (p.305). I think too that different versions are responsible to have messed up the replay.

The Manual states “To help players guard against turns being replayed for better results, we have designed our replay feature to save all game turn results. This means that no matter how many times the same turn is played, the results will always be the same” (p.305). I think too that different versions are responsible to have messed up the replay.

Good to know there is consensus. If I could only watch the replay once I'd be in trouble.

Also good to know that when they wrote the manual they knew there would never be patches.

You can adjust the speed for various parts of the replay. When doing your orders, hit the "P" key to bring up Preferences and then use either/or the right and left click to adjust the speed for the various parts. When watching a long ground bombardment attack, I hit the "Esc" key to speed it up as Allies. No sense waiting 5 minutes or more for that combat to finish up.

You can adjust the speed for various parts of the replay. When doing your orders, hit the "P" key to bring up Preferences and then use either/or the right and left click to adjust the speed for the various parts. When watching a long ground bombardment attack, I hit the "Esc" key to speed it up as Allies. No sense waiting 5 minutes or more for that combat to finish up.

I usually only watch full animation for surface to surface. Want to see torpedo results in detail, and expenditure. Watch some kinds of air animations, mostly strat bombing. A2A can be useful once in awhile if you're trying to judge ops losses for other side. ASw I watch for penetration hits, but you can do that at accerated if you watch closely.

That to me seems like a waste of time? You can always just look at the combat report and operations report to see what happened. In fact it has much more info that I'm now finding out about. Have heard ship collisions before and also against mines when watching. But those details of what exactly happened are in the reports that can easily be missed watching the turn combat replay results.

I'm somewhat new to WitP:AE, so maybe I'm missing something as to what the value is in watching the turn replays more than once?

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- Beta Tester WitE and ATG - Alpha Tester WitW

"Invincibility lies in the defence; the possibility of victory in the attack." - Sun Tzu

That to me seems like a waste of time? You can always just look at the combat report and operations report to see what happened. In fact it has much more info that I'm now finding out about. Have heard ship collisions before and also against mines when watching. But those details of what exactly happened are in the reports that can easily be missed watching the turn combat replay results.

I'm somewhat new to WitP:AE, so maybe I'm missing something as to what the value is in watching the turn replays more than once?

I watch them once fast to see what happened. I watch them again to refresh my memory after all the bourbon.

Seriously, watching them closely you can see attack vectors for air raids which can tell you where it came from. You can see which "hits" on subs were penetrating--the only kind which do significant damage--and which were random text strings about the bridge shaking. You can see which model and how many planes in A2A are more likely to have Ops damage and weigh that against the loss report which has different FOW applied. You can note where shells strike ships and get a feel for how bad fires are likely to be on enemy ships. You can do this by seeing what caliber of hit it was, not just a "hit." There are many more.

I also use the second or third replay to plan how I'm going to write the AAR. Things which looked important the first time can fade. And other things I missed can become more important.